Sethos

Herodotus in his history of Egypt placed Sennacheribs
invasion in the reign of the priest of Hephaestos, whose name
was Sethos. At that time, he wrote, king Sanacharib (came)
against Egypt with a great host of Arabians and Assyrians.(1)
It is generally assumed that Herodotus or his informants made a mistake:
In the popular tradition preserved by Herodotus the name of the
Egyptian king is given as Sethos . . . the true appellation
of the monarch has disappeared in favor of the great Seti. . . . It
is impossible to reject the whole story to the actual period of Seti
in face of the direct mention of Sennacherib (Sanacharaibos).(2)

In the conventional scheme of history Seti the Great
lived in the latter part of the fourteenth century; the events with
which we are now concerned took place in the final years of the eighth
century. Sethos of Herodotus was now, however, Seti the Great, as was
surmised by the historian quoted above: he was his grandfather. To keep
the narrative free from misunderstandings, I shall call the first of
that name the way Herodotos called him, Sethos, retaining
for the more famous grandson the name Seti.(3)
If we can prove our thesis then the confusion of history, for which
Herodotus is not to be blamed, put the grandson six hundred years before
his grandfather.

Sennacherib invaded Egypt twice. His first campaign resulted
in a victory for the Assyrians and Egypts submission; his second,
fifteen years later, as it will be told, ended in disaster. Sennacheribs
records speak only of his first campaign and are silent about the second;
the Scriptures do not distinguish between the two campaigns; and in
the Egyptian record, transmitted by Herodotus, only the second campaign
was remembered.(4) Each
of our sources has preserved only a part of the story, and to obtain
the complete picture we must draw on each of them in turn.

H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the
Near East, p. 492. See also idem in The Cambridge Ancient
History (1925), Vol. III, p. 279: It is simpler to suppose
that it is merely a traditional confusion of the old name Seti in
a wrong setting.

The more complete name of the grandfather,
Sethos, was Userkheprure-setpenre Seti-merenptah, and of his famous
grandson Seti-merenptah -menmaat re, or Seti
Ptah-maat. Merenptah means beloved of Ptah. The Greeks
identified Ptah with Hephaestos. In describing Sethos as a priest
of Hephaestos, Herodotos was evidently referring to Setis
second name. Cf. F. Ll. Griffith, Stories of the High Priests
of Memphis (Oxford, 1900), p. 8, note 1.

Herodotus is likewise silent about the conquest
of Egypt by Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal; nor does Manetho record
Egypts humiliation by Assyria.